The DFI LAN Party UT RDX200 CF-DR is the first Socket 939 CrossFire motherboard that we have ever seen, outside of reference hardware that came directly from ATi. This means that it has a pair of PCI Express 8x slots which will accept a pair of Radeon X850XT graphics cards, and in the future it will accommodate a pair of X1800XTs.

In other words it looks almost exactly like an Nvidia SLI motherboard, except it uses an ATi Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire chipset with SB450 Southbridge, instead of an Nforce4 SLI. To the best of our knowledge, from a graphics point of view the chipset in a CrossFire or SLI motherboard supports the PCI Express lanes and has no other function, so if ATi and Nvidia could agree to play nicely and sort out their drivers you could plug a pair of ATi graphics cards into an SLI board or, indeed, a pair of Nvidia cards into a CrossFire board. For now, though, if you want to use ATi graphics then CrossFire is the way forward and DFI is keen to charge for the privilege.

The layout of the motherboard is fairly unusual. For one thing the four memory slots which support the usual 4GB of PC3200 are positioned between the I/O panel and the processor socket. For another the I/O panel is amazingly sparse with a pair of PS/2 ports, coaxial S/PDIF input and output, six USB 2.0, a Firewire and dual Gigabit LAN. No mention, you will note, of serial or parallel ports or audio mini jacks.

The legacy ports are indeed missing but DFI has done something very odd with the audio mini jacks, which are on a separate module that plugs into the motherboard in the usual position. DFI calls this module 'Karajan' but the idea behind this move is completely puzzling as the native coaxial S/PDIF connector is surely the least popular choice among PC users. If the assumption is that we all have a PCI sound card then DFI could have omitted the S/PDIF as well, along with the Realtek ALC882 controller, and done something clever, such as install a cooling duct where the ports go.

DFI has chosen to use an eight-pin secondary ATX power connector next to the usual 24-pin main connector, which tells you something about the power requirements of this motherboard. There's a sticker in the box which tells you rather more: an Athlon 64 3400+ and a pair of X800 cards will draw 20A on the 12V rail and requires a 450W power supply. An Athlon 64 4000+ and a pair of X850 cards draws 25A and requires a 500W PSU, while an Athlon 64 FX-57 and a pair of X850 cards draws over 30A and requires a 600W PSU, so no matter what, you'll require a hefty power supply to run the DFI board.

In total there are eight SATA connectors with four on the SB450 Southbridge and four on a Sil3114 controller. However, all eight ports only run at the original SATA150 speed, and are not compliant with the newer SATA300 standard.

During our testing the DFI board performed well but we often found that when we came to shut the PC down it would restart instead. DFI sent us a revised BIOS which helped a little but the problem was still present to an extent.

DFI deserves congratulations for delivering the first CrossFire motherboard to market but there's some sort of glitch which causes it to behave erratically, and while this may be cured with a BIOS update in the future, we would expect a motherboard this expensive to be error-free.